The Stellar Forge
Private alpha — invitation only
You know how this goes. Session ends at 3 AM. Fifty frames sit in a folder. You have no idea how many are usable, how many hours remain toward your goal, whether last night's guiding problems are systemic or just the seeing. You open PHD2 graphs. You open the FITS folder. You do the arithmetic manually. Nothing talks to anything else.
The Stellar Forge is the connective tissue that was missing.
What It Is
A DevOps pipeline for imaging projects. Every frame acquired, every guiding segment, every focus run — collected, correlated, and turned into a single signal: are you on track to finish this project, and if not, why?
After each session, WBPP runs quality gates. Kept frames update your integration goal. Rejected frames get a root cause: guiding, focus, seeing, or clouds — not just "rejected." Your NINA sequence is rewritten with the correct remaining counts. One notification. One human action: reload the sequence before tonight.
The pipeline does not touch PixInsight. It does not make processing decisions. It automates the plumbing so the craft gets your full attention.
The Shift
Before
Browse AstroBin manually. Guess at filter weights and exposure times.
After
Recipes validated under your bortle, your focal ratio, your sensor type.
No systematic tracking of progress across sessions.
One health signal per filter: on track / at risk / complete / blocked.
Frame rejected. No record of why. Same mistake next session.
Rejection cause: guiding degraded at 02:14. Focus drifted 8 steps/hour. Or just clouds — nothing to fix.
Published image. No record of what happened behind it.
The full story — sessions, failures, fixes, conditions — narrated and published alongside the image.
The Pipeline
Acquisition — NINA sequences, collector running, every frame logged
↓
Transfer — Robocopy, spoke → server, automatic
↓
Quality gate — WBPP 2.9.0, per-frame FWHM / eccentricity / PSF weight
↓ ↓
Track 1: Plan — remaining frames recomputed, NINA JSON updated
Track 2: RCA — rejections × PHD2 × AF → guiding / focus / seeing / clouds
↓
⚠ Human gate — reload sequence in NINA. One gesture.
↓ (repeat until complete)
⚠ Human gate — PixInsight: the craft decisions, always yours
↓
Narrative — full project context → LLM → the story behind the image
↓
Publish — image + data + story + voice + video
The Alpha
The Stellar Forge is being built on a real imaging setup — FRA400, mono camera, AZ-EQ6, Bortle 3 from Liguria. The alpha will open to a small group of imagers running equivalent setups who want to run the pipeline on their own data and help shape the system.
What alpha testers get
- — Early access to all pipeline components as they ship
- — Direct input on priorities and design decisions
- — Their data and projects on the platform from day one
- — Named in the production release
What alpha testers need
- — NINA Advanced Sequencer for acquisition
- — PHD2 for guiding with logging enabled
- — PixInsight + WBPP 2.9.0 for calibration
- — An active multi-session narrowband or broadband project
- — Tolerance for rough edges and willingness to report them
Express Interest
The alpha is not open yet. If you fit the criteria above and want to be considered, send a brief note — your setup, your current project, why this matters to you.
Request Alpha Access